The managed state of an organization's individual endpoints may play a critical role in the overall security and availability of its Information Technology (“IT”) infrastructure and related business operations. The new wave of sophisticated crimeware not only targets specific companies, but may also target desktops and laptops as backdoor entryways into those enterprises' business operations and valuable resources. To safeguard themselves against these targeted threats, organizations may need to have a means to guarantee that each endpoint continually complies with corporate security and configuration management policies. Failure to guarantee endpoint policy compliance may leave organizations vulnerable to a wide array of threats. These threats may include the proliferation of malicious code throughout the enterprise, disruption of business-critical services, increased IT recovery and management costs, exposure of confidential information, damage to corporate brand, and/or regulatory fines due to non-compliance.
Network-access-control technologies may enable organizations to ensure the proper configuration and security state of user endpoints—including those of on-site employees, remote employees, guests, contractors, and temporary workers—before they are allowed to access resources on the corporate network. Network-access-control technologies may discover and evaluate endpoint compliance status, provision the appropriate network access, and provide for mediation capabilities to ensure that endpoint security policies and standards are met.
Virtualized environments may pose difficult security challenges in an enterprise environment. Since virtual machines are relatively easy to create, clone, store, and move, they can easily be out of compliance with corporate policies (such as not having the approved versions of software and patch levels). It may be unsafe to allow such virtual machines to launch with network connectivity in an enterprise's network. What is needed, therefore, are more efficient and effective mechanisms for providing network-access-control in virtual environments.